Book Image

Hands-On Penetration Testing on Windows

By : Phil Bramwell
Book Image

Hands-On Penetration Testing on Windows

By: Phil Bramwell

Overview of this book

Windows has always been the go-to platform for users around the globe to perform administration and ad hoc tasks, in settings that range from small offices to global enterprises, and this massive footprint makes securing Windows a unique challenge. This book will enable you to distinguish yourself to your clients. In this book, you'll learn advanced techniques to attack Windows environments from the indispensable toolkit that is Kali Linux. We'll work through core network hacking concepts and advanced Windows exploitation techniques, such as stack and heap overflows, precision heap spraying, and kernel exploitation, using coding principles that allow you to leverage powerful Python scripts and shellcode. We'll wrap up with post-exploitation strategies that enable you to go deeper and keep your access. Finally, we'll introduce kernel hacking fundamentals and fuzzing testing, so you can discover vulnerabilities and write custom exploits. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed in identifying vulnerabilities within the Windows OS and developing the desired solutions for them.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we learned the basics of low-level memory management during the execution of a program. We learned how to examine the finer points of what's happening during execution, including how to temporarily pause execution so we can examine memory in detail. We covered some basic introductory knowledge on assembly language and debugging to not only complete the study in this chapter, but to prepare for the work ahead in later chapters. We wrote up a quick and vulnerable C program to demonstrate stack overflow attacks; once we understood the program at the stack level, we generated a payload in pure hexadecimal opcodes with msfvenom. To prepare this payload for the target, we learned how to manually search for and remove code-breaking shellcode.